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Fructose As Culprit In the Obesity Epidemic
drewtheman writes "According to an interview with Dr. Robert Lustig, Professor of Pediatric Endocrinology from the University of California, San Francisco, fructose, once touted as diabetic-friendly because it doesn't raise insulin levels directly, could be a major culprit for the obesity epidemic, high blood pressure, and elevated blood levels of LDL in Americans and others worldwide as they adopt American-style diets. Fructose comprises 50% of table sugar and up to 90% of high-fructose corn syrup, both ingredients found in copious quantity in most American prepared foods."
How long have nutritionists been telling us this?
Sugar makes you fat? Who'd have thought?!
Excessive quantities of anything is not good for the diet. It has been known for decades that high quantities of carbohydrates can cause weight increase. The confusion here is linking fructose as being good for diabetics (yes, and it still is in reasonable quantities) and excessive consumption of fructose leading to obesity.
Have a look at soylentnews.org for a different view
Personally, I can't stand all the corn syrup the Americans seem to have in everything they eat. Maybe this is my body's way of saying "get the hell out of this silly country before you become one of them!"?
http://www.freakonomics.com/pdf/whatmakesfoodfatte ning.pdf
The Dietary and Nutritional Survey of British Adults, Gibson (1996, p. 405) concluded that "sugars
appear to have a weak negative [italics added] association with BMI that is not totally explained
by confounders such as dieting, under-reporting or the inverse correlation between energy from
sugars and fat."
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Thanks to those motherfuckers, the sugar growers, and the congresscritters, we pay about three times what the rest of the world pays for sugar. That's why we get that corn syrup crap in soft drinks, and so much of the rest of our food.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
But the smart money is still on "Burgers".
/ and no concept of portion control.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Pie is tasty and the sky will be blue tomorrow. No shit fructose is bad for us. It is pure simple sugars. The only fructose that IS good for humans is the fruit kind. And that is not simple sugar. Don't drink Soda Pop and always check the labels for High Fructose Corn Syrup. It is says it has it, don't buy it. That shit should be illegalized in most foods.
All dem commy pinko leftists wanna do is hurt the American farmer and its just a damn shame. /sarcasm
Corn is the one of the most powerful forces in America. This will get filed away with global warming as libral propaganda.
No more ketchup?...snapple? Mexican Coke still uses sugar so I'm cool there...but ketchup?
This ran a few years ago and was REALLY interesting. Corn in america == money. Farmers have a corn glut to deal with. 100 years ago, they put the extra corn to work as alcohol (whiskey), and soon we had a nation of alcoholics. So then they came up with corn syrup. That hasn't worked out too well considering how fat Americans are.
Next up-- ethanol!
...but where is a link to the paper or actual report? I just don't trust an interview as easily when it comes to scientific claims as I would the scientific data and whatever fallacies it may hold.
On another note, there have been plenty of studies already demonstrating how nutritionally bad fructose is bad for an individual. Here's a compilation I found awhile back of the cons of using fructose so widely in consumables: http://curezone.com/art/read.asp?ID=32&db=6&C0=17
Here's a decent rule of thumb when it comes to eating food: If you don't know understand what the ingredients are when you may not want to consume it. Pick up any random piece of junk food and read the ingredient panel. Kudos to you if you can even pronounce everything correctly.
There were published studies clearly showing this effect, 20 years ago. I guess it's taken this long for the industry to stop crushing it long enough to get a word out. I'd paste references but it's sunday morning and they're in a book on the other side of the room.
I am one of many. My idea is not unique, nor do I expect my voice alone to sway you. I speak in a chorus of opinion.
In Soviet Russia CIA spoils Cuban sugar for you.
Have you US cubicle jockeys ever thought about how much you are locked into corn syrup?
A few sick fat 'end users' will not stop the protectionism, tariffs and congress critters.
You have a huge set of new tax credits, grants and loans flowing into big corn for 'ethanol'
Then you have state subsidies.
Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life and own the world?
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Ever been to Mexico? Germany? Russia? God damn there are a lot of F-A-T F-U-C-K-E-R-S there. And man, are they U-G-L-Y to boot.
Fructose used responsibly is actually beneficial. Fructose is substantially sweeter than glucose, so consuming it could allow you to reduce your sugar intake. Consuming as much fructose as you would otherwise consume glucose is clearly bad for you, but there is an opportunity to reduce intake.
The HFCS used in most soft drinks is (I believe) 50% fructose. It is metabolised almost identically to sucrose: there is an initial enzyme that splits sucrose into glucose and fructose at similar ratios to the contents of the corn syrup, after that the metabolism is identical. It seems unlikely therefore that there is any substantial difference in health effects, and most of the studies quoted in the wikipedia article linked from the main story tend to agree with that.
I hate articles like this. The reader should not be blaming a single food as a CAUSE for obesity. The cause is that the consumer should not be eating large quantities of anything. Personally if anything is to blame then its the consumer for not getting off their ass and actually preparing food, going for a bike ride, or doing some running. Simple exercise like washing up has now been replaced with a dish washer, we mow lawns with electric/petrol mowers, and we don't even write letters by hand either, soon voice recognition will replace keyboard work. When will the world learn that as physical creatures we depend on a good, fresh diet and plenty of exercise.
Why UNIX?
Fructoses are simple monosaccharides. I don't remember them having corn-atoms
Bart: You could brush your teeth with milkshakes.
Dr. Nick: Hey, did you go to Hollywood Upstairs Medical College too?
-----
Homer: So you think you know better than this family, eh? Well as long as you're in my house you'll do what I do and believe what I believe! So butter your bacon!
Bart: Yes father.
Lisa: Mom, dad, my spiritual quest is over!
Homer: Hold that thought... Bacon up that sausage, boy!
Bart: But dad, my heart hurts!
Having been thin most all my life but finding I had high cholesterol, I was prescribed a popular anti-cholesterol medicine. I began to gain weight passing up what is normal for my height. But my doctor and chiropractor wanted me to lose weight, just 10 pounds. I found out about HFCS and eliminated it from my diet and within a few months lost 30 lbs.
And all I did was remove HFCS from my diet.
I suspect since the anti-cholesterol medicine has an effect on the liver, and apparently HFCS is mostly processed by the Liver, has something to do with my weight gain once on the meds.
Now this article suggest other sugars also contribute. I suppose I need to further reduce my sugar intake.
But here is a HFCS tip: Bread! I would buy bread that didn't have HFCS in it and git used to which brand I'd buy. Then I discovered that all the bread I was buying had the ingredients changed to include HFCS. And this I discovered after the cola industry said they would stop selling their HFCS drinks at schools. I guess the HFCS industry simply shifted what they include it in. So the school kids still get it????
Nasty corn industry!!
Seems to me the corn industry needs to be heavily taxed where teh tax is used for health care..... like cigarettes..
Why is fructose is considered to cause obesity in America and to be a health food in Europe? Might-the-glucose-syrup-be-the-problem?
No, you just need an English lesson.
When A comprises B, it means A is within B, whether it is in whole or in part.
When A IS comprised OF B, it means B is within A, whether it is in whole or in part.
Consider another verb for a simpler example:
Baked dough makes cookies.
Cookies are made of baked dough.
You appear to have reading comprehension problems.
Table sugar is comprised of 50% fructose (and 50% glucose, which is all equivalent to 100% sucrose)
HFCS has varying levels of fructose/glucose, and can be up to 90% fructose and 10% glucose.
HTH HAND
I tend to have more sympathy with this guy who asserts that the sucrose packaging of fructose is the most evil. Hope this adds interesting info. Please ignore the fact that the extract is hosted by "Nexus", who do have some rather wild ideas of their own!
SugarBlues
William Dufty © 1975
Extracted/edited from his book Sugar Blues
First published by Chilton Book Co. Padnor, PA, USA
Currently published by Warner Books, USA.
They said, "Fructose comprises 50% of table sugar and up to 90% of high-fructose corn syrup,..."
You say, "Fructose comprises of table sugar and corn syrup?"
I say, "Lysdexics Untie!"
Agree about the fucktose. I've avoided added sugars like that for a long time. I did not have a problem with weight gain nor overeating. I suddenly did recently because of a drug I was taking gain a lot of weight.
The drug cause the weight gain, it's a side effect. But the weight gain really screwed with my appetite and the weight gain caused me to be borderline type 2. It's been very hard to lose the weight and the screwy way the added weight effects my appetite has made control a problem even after discontinuing the drug.
I can't touch high fructose corn sugar at all. It will cause weigh gain and my blood sugar to be unstable.
I've now completely cut table sugar and anything with the fructose sugars out, I'd only been using table sugar in coffee regularly and did not regularly eat anything with fructose.
I severely control portions where before I didn't have to monitor things closely I now have to monitor them to what seems an insane level.
It was not that much of a weight gain but it caused such a severe effect.
I don't drink anything these days with HFCS in it. I mainly drink unsweetened iced tea, with some water and diet sodas for the hell of it. Actually, I don't drink any drinks with calories, even things sweetened with real sugar. It's the easiest way to cut calories out of your life.
Of course, I've also put on 10 pounds in the last four months, but I think that has to do more with moving to a town where I sit around all day, rather than going to Tae Kwon Do for one to three hours a day, four to six days a week.
Fructose comprises 50% of table sugar and up to 90% of high-fructose corn syrup, both ingredients found in copious quantity in most American prepared foods
Yea, but practically 90% things I see in the store HFCS and not Sugar.
Yay for Corn subsidies eh, making us all fat and all.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
Everytime I travel to the US and look at the ingredients its there on the side of the can every single time. Over in europe we use this amazing new invention called "sugar" instead.
So its not quite true to say that America are shipping the crap that is High Fructose Corn Syrup on the rest of the world, its actually that AMERICAN companies are using that on AMERICANS and using more natural ingredients outside of the US. This appears to be due to costs (its cheaper to use HFCS in the US, as sugar imports are penalised) meaning that the world's richest economy is using the cheapest and crappiest ingredients.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
Are you honestly telling me that if I eat all burgers and fries (supersized!) in the world, BUT pass on the sugar water, I'll be thin?
I hate "silver bullet" articles.
Fructose has been known to be not diabetic friendly for ages now. Where's the news?
One way or another, fructose is but one of the reasons for obesity. There are plenty of ways to get obese and, yes, shockingly, the most common ones include eating all sorts of calorie rich food without giving your body a way to expend those calories (the other include illnesses messing with the ability of the body to metabolize properly).
You know the laws of thermodynamics. Energy doesn't come from nothing (much to Steorn's shock), and doesn't become nothing.
People prefer there was a simple way they could eat pizzas and coke all day long and sit on their asses, and just flip a switch, and it's all gone!
... am the great cornholio! I must obey my bumholio!
C|N>K
both my cell phone provider (cingular, the 'new' att), & key bank websites have been down re: account access, since last night. the joys of corepirate nazi payper liesense softwar gangster billyonerrors boxes? sure makes the phone co. & the bank look lame/like hostages. US customers? well who gives a fud?
"There are 11 types of people in the world, those who know binaries and those who don't."
Ok so you don't, I do, but who is in the 3th group?
Sugar per se doesn't make one fat. An excess in energy intake makes one fat - energy is energy, be it of low or high glycemic index; you can gain fat from eating apples and bananas just as you can from BigMac's. The americas just so happen to be very keen on high energy foods, and their food industry commonly thinks they can replace the high GI sugar with low GI fructose to dampen the effect.
/ a dietist and nutrition scholar
Honestly, before posting I did check couple of the examples given in Webster's web dictionary. Comprise 1 : to include especially within a particular scope... 2 : to be made up of
But hold your horses, fat lady - I have not started to sing yet
I gave up HFCS and since last November I have lost about 70 pounds.
"Remember, there never were pineapple-almond cookies here."
So it's because of this sugar that people are fat. Not that they eat too much.
Isn't it about time the population at large (pun intended) got a grip and instead of looking for the cause in something they can shift the blame onto, started examining their own behaviour?
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
The frustose is from Corn Syrup, not sugar cane. Your rant against sugar farmers should be directed at the corn lobby. Why do you think soft drinks here use corn syrup instead of cane sugar?
That's up to 140% of itself ;-) Better than our athletes who sometimes give 110% of themselves !
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
1. Lustig says:
So if we eat significant fiber with everything we ingest does everything become low GI? Or what? This will definitely make me eat French bread (if that has bran?) and no more white bread (which I have known is a "slab of sugar" but didn't really use that knowledge). And what is a compact source of fiber? I doubt you could drink a cola with HFCS and neutralize its evil with a graham cracker (if that has bran in it?) but what's the score there?
2. The experiment in which a drug was administered to children whose brains could not detect leptin resulted in the kids spontaneously working out, doing sports, eliminating soda from their diet, etc. I'd like to know what the kids thought / felt during the study, and want to know if we can "fool" ourselves into doing the same kind of activities and getting a similar effect, in effect bootstrapping a similar kind of health benefit without taking the drug Octreotide. (and what is that drug, sounds pretty strong!)
3. Extremely refreshing and seemingly sensible comments about why it is important to exercise. This has got to be massively important for geeks. Personally I had an obese father who as a doctor unfortunately must have been an ultrageek since he didn't want to do any sports that could hurt his hands (since he couldn't do surgery). He got diabetes. I've been heavy (not astoundingly, but overweight) since I was little and he encouraged me to sit in my room and play with my Apple II all summer I remember well, and now after he got diabetes and bypasses he said "turns out I was wrong, exercise is important!" I coulda killed him!
So anyway this is quite important and felt like a revelation: While calories are one thing I thought exercise was basically to boost the metabolism to burn food faster. Well this article says exercise increases skeletal muscle insulin sensitivity (so less insulin is made so less blood sugar is shunted into fat), lowers cortisol (which is a "megastress hormone" that the article says triggers deposition of bad fat, and finally detoxifies fructose.
These are all awesomely understandable reasons why you gotta exercise and at least to me at this moment it makes me want to throw this glass of diet cola (who cares! anything unhealthy!) off the table and never look a piece of white bread in the face again. Now we need some "best practices" or programming style guides that include exercise with this info in it, of course optimized for maximum concentration and efficiency with minimum weight gain.
A few years ago I became aware of HFCS, and was amazed at how pervasive it is. With the birth of my son I needed to lose weight, and was starting to really be aware of what I ate. I changed two things about my lifestyle. I eliminated almost all HFCS (mostly sodas), and started exercising more regularly. I lost 60 pounds, and have kept it off. I don't know about any of the scientific arguments, but my experience tells me HFCS has a big role to play in out society's weight issues. There are other factors, including exercise which I mentioned. But if you want to get creeped out, go to a convenience store and try to find something without corn syrup in some form. Perhaps the weight loss can party be credited to the fact that I eat better foods and drink more water by avoiding HFCS. But the bottom line is this. For me, getting rid of HFCS either caused me to lose weight directly, or forced me to eat healthier by avoiding it.
Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a difficult battle. - Plato
Use rice syrup, which contains no fructose. You can substitute it 1:1 for corn syrup.
I use it to make all sorts of treats, including marshmallows.
Clearly people aren't taking the time to read the article (I'm shocked), so here's a summary of the fructose info...
Our consumption of fructose has gone from less than half a pound per year in 1970 to 56 pounds per year in 2003.
high fructose corn syrup came on the market after it was invented in Japan in 1966, and started finding its way into American foods in 1975. In 1980 the soft drink companies started introducing it into soft drinks and you can actually trace the prevalence of childhood obesity, and the rise, to 1980 when this change was made.
it's not the calories that are different it's the fact that the only organ in your body that can take up fructose is your liver. Glucose, the standard sugar, can be taken up by every organ in the body, only 20% of glucose load ends up at your liver. So let's take 120 calories of glucose, that's two slices of white bread as an example, only 24 of those 120 calories will be metabolised by the liver, the rest of it will be metabolised by your muscles, by your brain, by your kidneys, by your heart etc.. Now let's take 120 calories of orange juice. Same 120 calories but now 60 of those calories are going to be fructose because fructose is half of sucrose and sucrose is what's in orange juice. So it's going to be all the fructose, that's 60 calories, plus 20% of the glucose, so that's another 12 out of 60 -- so in other words 72 out of the 120 calories will hit the liver, three times the substrate as when it was just glucose alone.
fructose [does] three things that are particularly bad in the liver. The first is this uric acid pathway that I just mentioned, the second is that fructose initiates what's known as de novo lipogenesis...Which is fat production...Excess fat production and so VLDL [the bad form of cholesterol], very low density lipoproteins end up being manufactured when you consume this large bolus of fructose in a way that glucose does not, and so that leads to dyslipidaemia.
And then the last thing that fructose does in the liver is it initiates an enzyme called Junk one, ...and when you initiate Junk one what happens is that your insulin receptor in your liver stops working...that means your insulin levels all over your body have to rise.
put all of this together and basically you've got a feed forward system of increased insulin, increased liver fat, liver deposition of fat, increased inflammation -- you end up with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. You end up with your inability to see your leptin [**leptin tells your brain you are full**] and so you consume more fructose and you've now got a viscious cycle out of control.
In fact fructose, because of the way it's metabolised, is actually damaging your liver the same way alcohol is. In fact it's the exact same pathway, in fact fructose is alcohol without the buzz.
I took organic chemistry so I understand what the ingredient are (at least on the basic structural level) and can pronunce them very well ;).
Anyway the argument is a bad one (and remind me of the argument of people saying "oh god they are adding chemicals in our food") If you took normal organic growing food and we told you the list of stuff inside it, you would not understand half of it, still that would not make it more or less dangerous. 2-oxo-L-threo-hexono-1,4- lactone-2,3-enediol is an example of it. Naturally I could call it L-ascorbate too. Or maybe vitamin C. The problem are not that people don't understand what the smallest ingredient part in ppm or milli% of their food composition is, the problem is that people ignore totally the composition of the main ingredient, like fat, and refuse to do sport, and eat a lot during the day way way more than is necessary for their activities, and not equilibrated. It is a LIFESTYLE problem. It ain't one signle factor but a combination of many. And no, the ingredient you can't pronunce without having being in university ain't the problem.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
Time to coin another useless acronym. Where's The Fucking Article!
consist, comprise, constitute, or compose To consist of something is to be made up of it: The programme consisted of two short plays. To comprise something has the same meaning, often implying that the whole is regarded from the point of view of its individual parts: The programme comprises two short plays (they were chosen to make it up). To constitute something is to form a whole, especially of dissimilar components: Wealth and health do not necessarily constitute happiness. To compose means the same, but implies that the components have something in common: Water is composed of hydrogen and oxygen. A common mistake is to confuse consist and comprise, saying, for example: The programme is comprised of two short plays. http://www.tiscali.co.uk/reference/dictionaries/en glish/data/d0081813.html
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
greedy pigs culprit in obesity epidemic.
"There are plenty of ways to get obese and, yes, shockingly, the most common ones include eating all sorts of calorie rich food without giving your body a way to expend those calories."
That's true to an extent, but our bodies are in fact designed to expel unneeded calories. The sensitivity of these triggers seems to differ from person to person, which is one reason some people can eat anything they want without gaining weight, while others can count calories and still become obese.
I was in the latter group. Exercising daily and eating quite well, yet ending up in my mid-twenties at an overweight 230 pounds. It turns out carbohydrates -- and especially sugars like fructose -- cause a rapid blood sugar spike and insulin production, which in turn triggers your body to conserve excess calories in fat cells. At last, I stopped eating less and started eating differently -- no sugars and starches, but plenty of protein and fat -- and dropped 75 pounds so quickly I astonished everyone I knew. Without the carb/insulin trigger, your body naturally uses only the calories it needs and eliminates the rest.
He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
Fear not, there are misunderstandings aplenty to share round -- on your part, and in the gpp, and in the sentence you quoted in your ggpp. "Comprise" is a notoriously difficult verb because it can mean either "include" or "be included", pretty much at the whim of the speaker. (Just as a sign of this, I note that the Oxford English Dictionary lists nine primary meanings of the verb, some of which contradict each other, and somewhere between 20 and 25 secondary meanings. Yikes.)
When the gpp said, "When A IS comprised OF B, it means B is within A, whether it is in whole or in part", that does conform to common usage; but the bit about "When A comprises B" can go either way depending on context. (The line you originally quoted, "Fructose comprises 50% of table sugar", does indeed strongly imply that "fructose" contains 50% of all table sugar in the universe. Whatever that could possibly mean, i.e. not much.)
Personally I try to avoid this verb ...
Great, another thing for fat people to blame their fatness on.
People are fat because they've neglected to balance their exercise with their diet, period.
I didn't have a lick of fat on me untill about 2 years ago, when I ventured into computers & away from construction jobs a year earlier. My diet hasn't changed at all.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
I agree about the whole "healthy lifestyle" thing you're talking about, I finally, FINALLY, gave up all soft drinks 7 months ago, and after a 1 week craving for them, I don't even miss them. They even seem a bit gross to me now. And I was a steady guzzler of them for about 20 years. I'm still trying to find the right balance of things to eat in a situation where I rarely have time to sit down and eat. Going out to restaurants is really madness; there's rarely anything healthy on the menu.
Anyway, back to my point. I think you'll see most people of European decent living into their 90's as well. My parents and my wife's are both in their late 80's and very healthy. It's likely most, if not all, will live into their 90's. I think looking at the average is deceptive because it includes people who dies of violent means, and people who die of lack of ongoing medical care. I'm not saying their not important, but if we're looking at the age people will die at to compare to Japan, that's more accurate.
But the obesity epidemic really is frightening in this country. My wife and I went to an amusement park with our teenaged kids a few weeks ago, and everybody was fat. I see fat people in cars, and it's no wonder they're fat, they're always eating in their cars. So image you've got fat people, eating and on the phone. I guess talking about how hungry they are?
And as much as the Europeans on this board make fun of the U.S. for this, I say they're only 10 years behind. I've travelled a lot to various European countries, and the things people do in the U.S. they do in their country 10 years later.
Any health professional knows or should know this. Fructose (aka Corn syrup) is derived from Sucrose (table sugar) by cleaving the molecule and yielding 50% fructose and 50% glucose. Fructose has been recommended for use by diabetics for many years when they go into hypoglycaemia (low blood sugar levels) as it can be used immediately with no biochemical modifications by the body. Fructose is found naturally in many fruits. It is a major ingredient of most soft drinks and the first to use it was the famous American soda C*** Cola. It is also the main ingredient of most sport energy drinks.
Unfortunately it seems that the popular media seems to think that fat in the diet is the major reason for obesity, particularly in the UK where there is seldom any attention given to carbohydrates of any type. Carbohydrates are the major cause of obesity in almost all societies. Just examine the metabolic pathway of the body to understand why. The body uses the easiest pathway to generate energy and the quickest is fructose. The body's common fuel is glucose. In normal times there should be sufficient glucose intake (mostly derived from the breakdown of complex carbohydrates like flour and potatoes) to supply the body's needs. When the body has more glucose than it needs it produces it's own starch called glycogen which is then stored (mainly in the liver). There is obviously an exchange process at work all the time. When the body is low on glucose it will convert glycogen to glucose. When there are excessive supplies of glycogen and glucose it will convert the glycogen into fat for storage around the body. In states of energy deficiency the body will use its own protein.
In the developed world where people have moved from a state of survival into a state of excess they consume excessive quantities of carbohydrates, fats and salt. The energy pathway described above is a simplistic view but the body will always use the simplest route to energy. It will use sugar first, then complex carbohydrates and then protein. Fat will mostly be sent to storage. Because most of us consume to much carbohydrate we gain weight through the conversion to starch and fat. Anyone who has been on a diet will know that weight loss occurs in stages as the body starts to mobilise the glycogen and fat stores which take a while to convert in significant quantities.
One of the reasons Fructose gets so much coverage lately is a number of discoveries about the way it affects metabolism. Among them the discovery that Fructose, unlike glucose, does not cause a normal satiety response in humans. What does this mean? It means that people can eat fructose heavy foods all day long, and the natural metabolic changes that trigger the sensation in the brain that says "I feel full. I should stop eating." never happen, or are at least strongly suppressed. Is it not clear why many people suspect that's a problem and might lead to increased incidence of obesity? The attention focused is due to the degree to which High Fructose Corn Syrup is used in the American Food Industry. They're trying to focus on the problem areas in the American diet that they suspect change would result in the biggest impact.
... and don't exercise.
Film at eleven.
"My country, right or wrong; if right, to be kept right; and if wrong, to be set right." --Senator Carl Schurz (1872)
So ethanol is a retrogressive policy for corn then?
is evil
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
What a canard the HFCS scare is. HFCS, at least as used by most soda producers, is between 52% and 56% fructose, not 90% as the lead in to the article suggests. This fact seems to elude people though as they continue to brag about how they only buy products made with cane sugar. Its pretty clear that the issue is overall sugar consumption, both of HFCS and cane sugar (sucrose). To say "gee, ever since the evil soda producers started using HFCS in the early 80's, obesity has gone up with it" is about as useful as pointing out that "gee, ever since the introduction of the pc, obesity levels have risen drammatically". It comes across to me as scare mongering and reduces the credibility of the study in my eyes. The issue isn't cane sugar vs. HFCS, the issue is overall soda consumption and more and more sedentary lifestyles.
"The question I've been interested in now for the last ten years is what is actually blocking that signal to the brain to tell our bodies to eat less and exercise more?"
Your brain is blinded to the leptin signal that tells it to stop eating and start exercising. Your brain tells you that you're starving and tries to protect you by making you stop exercising and start eating. You get the perverse effect that your stomach is full and you still feel hungry.
The net result is that many of the people (mainly female), who under-eat and over-exercise, are doing just as much harm to their health as letting themselves become obese.
Fructose really is alcohol without the buzz. It poisons your liver. It tricks your brain.
You can't say that an obese child lacks willpower. That's dumb. Lustig pointed out that when children were treated for leptin blindness, they spontaneously started exercising. The problem is too much fructose and too little fiber and that is largely the fault of the food industry.
I don't think corn ethanol created a nation of alcoholics, at least I'm skeptical of your claim. That's just one product and I don't really know of anyone that drinks corn alcohol products.
The story of vitamin C is that it got a "layman" name and this is why it is named explicitely so. But many of the compound you see in a list with organic name don't really have a layman name. Or were derivate of such compound. Do you REALLY think the FDA and other local administration would allow poison to be sold in fast food even in small quantity ? The fact is the following :
* those are mostly conservant, anti oxydant, flavor or colorant
* they are in small quantity and are not poisonous/do not pose a health risk at the quantity they are.
And before you nail me by saying "yeah but if you take them at higher quantity they might be deadly" , well as far as I know even vitamin C has god a LD 50 (lethal dosis at which statistically 50% of a population die), even through it cannot be reached with oral absorption. Everything kill you if it taken in hgih enough quantity. It is all a mater of dose.
There is nothing they want to hide you with strange name organic compound, it is mostly they do not have other layman name.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
I think that this is true. Because Fructose is metabolized rapidly and converted easily to fats stored in the adipose tissue.
Largely because they seem to have made no attempt to really buy cheap foods. The biggest one would be rice. You can get an amazing amount of calories from rice and that shit is dirt cheap. It is also soaks up flavours really well so you can season it easily, and cheaply. You should be able to get rice in a 50 pound bag for around $14. Now given that you get about 220 calories per cup and a cup weighs 7 oz or so that's about 25,000 calories per bag, or a while weeks worth of calories for one large person.
Using that as a staple, you find that you now have more to spend on other things. You also will discover that rice is quite healthy.
Now please don't think I'm arguing that people should have to live off of a couple bucks a day for food, but realise that these congress people aren't doing it right. When it comes to really cutting food budget, you don't go to White Castle. You concentrate on materials which are cheap and have good calorie content. Rice is essentially the unbeatable champ in that area and hence forms your staple (it is not such a coincidence that it often forms the staple of diets for people more poor than is even conceivable in the US). Beans also work well, especially when purchased bagged and not canned, and they supply protein. Beans and rice, though not glorious, are just about enough on their own to sustain you.
If they are serious about seeing how to live on an extremely low budget for food, they should at least make an honest effort.
Water has a LD 50. You can die drinking water, not drowning, just drinking. If you drink enough (it is extremely hard to do but you can do it) you'll dilute the electrolytes in your body to the point it can't function, and you will die. However, you'd have a hard time arguing that water is dangerous or should be eliminated as it is, you know, kinda necessary to life and all.
I understood that food manufacturers started using high-fructose corn syrup as a substitue for cane sugar because of a run-up in cane sugar prices, and corn syrup was a cheaper alternative, not because they sold more product. This talk about the correlation between high-fructose corn syrup and obesity has been around for awhile. There are also cultural reasons for obesity, especially the difficulty some cultures have with denying their children sweets, and the ideal of a corpulent baby. Although he points out the significant amount of exercise to work off the calories of just one chocolate chip cookie, the amount of exercise among schoolchildren in the U.S. has also decreased dramatically, and the benefits of exercise exceed simply the number of calories burned during the activity.
When I found out that my body couldn't process the stuff properly i.e. mildly allergic. It became a struggle to find even bread without the stuff. It was worth it though. I ended up feeling better and actually lost weight as soon as I dropped the crap. I also slept better and had my digestive troubles ease. If something that is supposedly "safe" can do that to your body I don't want to know what is considered dangerous.
Because glucose is tastier. Seriously, any of these reports aside (which often overstate conclusions and are backed by questionable data) sugar in soft drinks is much tastier. It's not as wide spread, but not really that hard to get. Jones Soda is all cane sugar and currently Costco (at least our Costco) is carrying Coke imported from Mexico which is also real sugar. Also, if you sniff around online, you'll find other sources. For example there is one Dr. Pepper plant in the US that makes it with real sugar and will be happy to ship it to you.
Yes it does cost a little more, but it is well worth it. In my mind if you are going to get the calories, enjoy them when you do. I find that the difference between HFCS soda and sugar soda is about as big as the difference between diet and regular.
If you've never done it, go low-carb for a month. For many Americans, you can kind of cheat on this by simply not drinking sweet drinks and not eating candy or other sweets for a month -- you don't have to go full anti-bread and pasta and rice. Cut out diet drinks too and just drink water or unsweetened tea.
Somewhere over the course of this month, you will begin to realize just how much sugar is hidden in fast food. McDonalds and Burger King buns as well as Pizza Hut pizza sauce taste repulsively sweet once you're no longer used to a certain minimum amount of sugar in each meal. I've tried to avoid fast food ever since I did this a few years ago by accident when I tried to switch to only drinking water to save money and lose weight. It's really obscene.
(Unfortunately, after long enough not drinking sugary drinks, you do become used to the flavor and learn to ignore it in fast food again, but it's still an eye opener as long as you remember it.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
The archtypical US spirit is bourbon. Funny, that is supposed to be (by law!) 51% corn alcohol.
So, none of your acquaintances ever drink bourbon?
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Those that think that Diet Soda helps with obesity, should try to find any study that shows that. There are none. (If there were, Coke and Pepsi would let you know).
There was at least one that showed that drinking diet soda was associated with weight gain. (Fowler).
So for those that convince themselves that the nasty aftertaste isn't there, why exactly are you drinking it? Because the marketing says it is good for diets or diabetes?
Drink Water.
For a good 6 years. (I've since switched to sweet tea because it is *a lot* cheaper) I'm considered very thin by most fat American's standards, but I'm right in the middle of my suggested BMI range. (So I generally consider myself normal and everyone else fat as f ck.) According to nutritiondata.com, a glycemic index of 10 is low, 20 is high. Just by entering the tea I drink, my glycemic index to about 120. And that's using less than half the sugars I used to get in the Dr. Pepper. Strangely, I can actually see where I put on a little weight after making the switch from DP to Tea. My current thoughts on the situation are either the increased fluorine, the *decrease* in high fructose corn syrup, or a combination of those two things has caused it.
Regardless, I get *way* more of the stuff than most people do, so I'm not buying the whole HFC makes you fat argument. Feeding you face 8 times a day with butter, cheese, and fried potatoes makes you fat. Seriously, get a jumbo size meal at McDonald's and *just* the french fries is over half your recommended daily allowance for fat. If you're fat, just keep a log of all your eating for a week. You'll see where it's coming from. Most people realize why they're fat though. They just don't care enough to stop eating the things they like which make them fat.
Exactly, I'm tired of all the rants about High Fructose Corn Syrup. I eat and drink a lot of fructose all day every day. I'm not fat - quite in shape really - and it's all through a miraculous item called exercise. I do this strange activity just once a week and yet somehow soldier on in what these articles depict as a deluded American hellscape where people grow corn and get it all sugary for my delight... so they can secretly kill me. Apparently I alone boldly stand in defiance of their evil plans, delighting in all of their sweet, fructosey products yet lacking a gut all the while.
Seriously, I'm tired of people telling me I can't have products with High Fructose Corn Syrup in it. Have you tried European Coke? I have. It sucks. Give me the one I grew up with and stop pretending people can't just get off their duff and exercise once in a while.
All you fatty Mountain Dew-ers are belong to us.
As per oil, the US economy runs on anything that can be re-sold at a decent profit, no matter it's effect on the environment or individual. While this comment is no attack on the American people (I am a Brit who lived in California for 10 years), the current anti-American feeling world-wide is not really due to the war in Iraq, but the rise of the Internet and therefore the ability for people to learn how the world and their bodies work - with no nefarious industry or government interference, means we're all seeing the light now.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Where, in jcr's post did he talk about any of that?
All he said was that it's the combined fault of the sugar and corn lobbies and Congress that sugar is so expensive and corn sweetener is so cheap. This is objective fact. The only reason our country is considering corn-based ethanol fuel (one of the least efficient methods of production) is because of our sugar tarriff and corn subsidy regime.
He also suggested that corn syrup is "crap," which is an opinion, but does not imply the reason why he thinks it's crap.
All the rest of your tirade against him for making a "stupid argument" seems to be about the connection between obesity and corn syrup which he makes no reference to in the post you replied to. Basically, your entire post is either a straw man argument or a complete non sequitur. Did you actually read his post, or were you just eager to find a highly moderated post to ride on to inject your own opinion about something else being argued elsewhere in the (borne-out) hopes of getting modded up?
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
I'm down 35 pounds since Dec 2006 as a mix of diet and exercise.
Dump sugars and simple starches. Get plenty of fiber and moderate amounts of complex carbs. Fats are reasonably OK (and are insulin-neutral), but stick to poly- and mono-unsaturated where possible.
Add to that: significant protein. 0.7 - 0.9 gm per pound of lean body weight (the amount depends on your activity level, Google for references and some DIY body fat estimation methods).
As TFA indicates, cardio is good, and I've stepped up my workout with 2-3 additional days of long, moderately intense activity. The calorie burn is useful, but there are other benefits of cardio (also covered in TFA) which I appreciate (keeps me sane, much better general cardiovascular fitness).
Another key for me was weight/resistance training. In particular, if you want to get your ass into shape, get your ass into shape: glutes, hams, quads. Adding lean muscle mass both changes your body composition in general, and changes metabolism. Working major muscle groups, above plus the major back muscles (lats, traps, rhomboids, delts), and chest (pecs), as well as your core stabilizers (abs, spinal erectors (lower back) mostly as a guard against back pain/injury, will give you huge benefits. That's 4-5 strength exercises, 2-3 times a week (I'm doing more exercises, 2x week), which will make a dramatic change.
A book I'd highly recommend is Dr. Bob Arnot's Guide to Turning Back the Clock (1996). I actually ran across that after about five months on my routine, and found that the guidelines generally agreed with my own experiences, with some pointers which I've incorporated for better effect. There are numerous other good guides to specific aspects of the program (diet, exercise, cardio, weighs), as well as more recent materials than Arnot's, though his information appears to be aging quite well (as is Dr. Bob). Variants of the basic diet range from the full Atkins regime (carbs: bad, meats: good, fats: good) to Ornish (sugars: bad, meat: bad, protein: good, complex carbs: good). The truth is probably somewhere between. Gina Kolata (NY Times health reporter) has a bood out that seems to be an omnibus review of many of these methods, was reviewing it briefly yesterday.
--
Karsten M. Self http://linuxmafia.com/~karsten
feel hungry. I wonder what's in the fridge? Oh, lard! Mmmm!
Is there anything less interesting than a blame list? These culprits in the War On Obesity have merely changed nouns. I remember way back in the early seventies when my then somewhat less than nimble father in law attributed his vast bulk to his big bones. I was more convinced that the real culprits were all of the bones in his right arm and his jaw.
So nothing has changed, the culprits are always outside the remit of human responsibility - whether they are destiny or multinational corporations.
People have a right to choose what to eat. It's up to them to afford it and the responsibility for their weight, their health and anything else of the person - that's theirs too.
All this BS about whatever has nothing to do with anything. Fructose, Schmuctose.
Who are all these food police? People are allowed guns but not corn syrup?
Oh, wait, what's that I see yonder? Not windmills by any chance and fresh for tilting at too.
You know what they'll be cracking down and baccy and beer next. And then, what will we do?
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
In modern times, no. However, in pre-Temperance America, there was no easier way to export corn from the country's rich corn-growing belts than corn-based alcohol. Dried corn has bulky to ship, could go bad in transit, and had less market, so whisky was the way to go. In colonial America, people drank about 3-4 times the amount of alcohol the average American drinks today, and these rates would go up over the next couple of centuries until the Temperance backlash put a stop to that. Ever since the British tried to cut off colonialists supplies to sugar and molasses for rum during the Revolution, corn whisky from the Midwest took over as America's hard liquor of choice.
Read more about it here.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
Did you ever think that Starbucks is chiefly purveyor of sugar not coffee? The caloric content of their drinks is off the charts. America is fat because of cheap sugar and sugar is in everything. Even your coffee shop sells sugar and lots of it.
Sammy at Personafile
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
It's funny with people: you threaten to take away their donuts and their soda, and they get all riled up, but you take away their civil liberties, and they don't seem to care very much.
From the food processor's point of view it would be counterproductive to get consumers to prepare their own healthy meals. That would just kill their profits.
Since there is an increasing obesity problem in Australia where cane sugar is cheaper than corn syrup you do have a very good point. Possibly the only drink with HFCS in it here was Dr Pepper and that may have changed now that it is made locally. However there are factors that make it easier to put on weight with HFCS than cane sugar.
Corn syrup is excluded from most baby food. Gee, I wonder why?
Do we just let these people be and continue to put an enormous burden on the already-overburdened health-care system? Or do we just admit that, for some things, we really do need a "nanny state" because the population has demonstrated that it can't take care of itself?
If you reply, do so only to what I explicitly wrote. If I didn't write it, don't assume or infer it.
The fact of the matter is, some Phd for some company somewhere came up with the idea that high fructose corn syrup was a better, lower cost way to sweeten food. While its great that, two generations of heart attacks down the road, that other scientists have stepped up to the plate and said that it wasn't, one has to ask, what else is new that is really safe? Cell phones, pervasive wireless, the use of plastics? It seems like every new technology that we've created has had a dark side discovered a generation later, and I wonder if, any more, the smart strategy is that, if something new does come out, to maybe not so blindly trust it?
This is my sig.
In fact, theft from vending machines is a reasonably common occurrence in Japan (at least in Osaka, where I know someone who runs a few).
In addition, up until a few years ago, the (South) Korean 500 Won and Japanese 500 Yen coins were so similar that they could be used interchangeably in vending machines. Unfortunately for the machine owners, 500 Won is worth about 50 Yen! They've changed the composition of the Japanese coin now so that it can be differentiated.
If your comment title says 'Re: Foo', I'm not likely to read it.
The idea you can get tasty veggies for cheap is simply bullshit.
I bought a packet of 40+ wax bean seeds yesterday for $1.29. That should yield about 25 pounds of fresh veggies in about two months. There's no reason anybody with a 20x20 patch of yard can't keep their family well fed with veggies for at least the summer months. Yeah, living in cities is hugely expensive.
OK, time to get off Slashdot and go pick a day's worth of lettuce ($5 worth of seed for the summer).
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
and have the TIME to do the shopping, the TIME to do the prep, the TIME to do the actual cooking (plus some implements and not an immeasurable amount of skill are also involved) and there's the clean up after which also takes TIME.
Getting a decent dinner on the table takes TIME.
Getting a "Murder Burger" at White Castle takes a fraction of the TIME.
It might kill you slowly but it does it fast.
Your only contribution is some money.
All these food companies make their money on convenience (a net saving of minutes per day when you don't have to be in the kitchen [that's when you even have a kitchen {many apartment buildings in New York City don't even HAVE kitchens.}])
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
If you're BUYING it somebody's SELLING it.
:-)
They're going to use the cheapest "government approved" shit that they can get away with to make their dough (and don't get me started on bread. [That plastic-wrapped shit with a shelf-life into the next millenium is NOT bread... {And I'm well aware of the "double-entendre" of dough. }]
And when "push comes to shove" they'll claim they were following government regulations and be legally liable for none of it, Just like with urea-formaldehyde foam, we taxpayers will be stuck with the bill.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
I am all about not spending time cooking, though I am quite good at it (I hate cooking for one is the main reason). That's one of the main reasons I eat poorly is that I'd rather just buy something frozen. However, for me money is a minor concern. I've got plenty of it to spend on food. The question here is how to eat on an extremely low budget. When you do that, you've got to cook. It actually turns out not to take a whole lot of time because it is rather simple. You don't have many options, and most of them aren't complicated. Beans and rice, for example, just need to be boiled for a while.
It is actually generally the more expensive stuff that takes more time. I can make a simple rice bowl in like 40 minutes, of which I spend maybe 5 doing work (the rest is waiting). Get rice going, cut up whatever is going in it, wait, dump fillers in rice, pour on sauce, eat. The stuff that takes a long time is like a nice fresh pasta with side dishes. It can take all day if you are making the noodles and sauce fresh. However, it also isn't cheap and thus isn't a target here.
If you want to eat on $5/day (which is what your target is assuming you spend nothing more than the food stamps you could get) you have to buy cheap components and assemble them.
You might have more luck dropping soda if you learn to make you own beverages where you can control the amount of sugar, if any. My staples are iced-tea and lemonade, as well as hot tea. I like my iced-tea unsweetened, but I will sweeten it, slightly, for my wife. Lemonade requires a bit more sugar. Hot tea needs none (for my tastes).
However, the important part here is that you can gradually reduce the sugar over time until you get to a point where very low to no sugar drinks are fine without having to go to nothing but water. I'll put a 1/4 cup of sugar in a gallon of iced-tea. I'm not sure how this compares to soda. If it isn't sweet enough at first, start with more and decrease the amount over time. Lemonade, made from lemon juice, water and sugar tends to get twice that amount, but I'm not trying to give up sugar, just to have control over the amount.
Iced Tea
One family-sized tea bag per quart of water. Refrigerate for 24-hours. Remove tea-bags and enjoy.
Lemonade
1.5 cups of lemon juice and a 1/2 cup sugar in a gallon container. Fill remainder of container with water.
There's a show on TV called 30 Minute Meals. It stars Rachael Ray. There are also several books containing the recipes for the meals shown on the show. Who would've thought that there would be books that tell you how to cook things?
Cheat with whom you damn well please woman, because it's your No-Fault Divorce. (You'll get all the stuff and kids and future paychecks anyway)
Why do people spend so much time trying to figure this crap out? The cause of obesity is because people eat too much. It doesn't matter if it's truffles or rice cakes, if you eat too much you are going to get fat.
People need to jump on the fad called the common sense diet. It is a diet where you eat less of what you normally eat to lose weight. It saves you money and you don't have to eat stuff you don't like. You don't even have to go to a gym and it works. If all you eat is crap it won't make you healthier though, but at least you will be thinner. One exception exists however, if you are still gaining weight after cutting back your intake it means you are still eating too much and need to go back to the first step.
I love how people state they have tried everything and they can't lose weight. I bet they haven't tried starving themselves. No one on the planet can become or remain obese if they quit eating.
The next time I hear a fat person tell me they are starving...
The reality is HFCS is truly bad for human consumption.
It is not processed by your body like most people think.
Sucrose is a disaccaride composed of one Fructose and one Glucose molecule.
When your body digests it, your body converts it into Fructose and Glucose. The Glucose is used by most of your body. Fructose is largely processed in ONE organ in your body- the Liver. It can use either sugar for fuel and does a conversion of either into Glucogen. Your liver will store roughly one day's worth of glucogen up before converting the rest to FAT. The reason Fructose doesn't change blood serum sugar levels is because it isn't glucose, doesn't largely get converted to it. But it does get into your blood stream all the same and since your body detects a sugar present, it pumps Insulin into the system, causing HUGE spikes in the stuff. What HFCS does is it gets into your blood stream directly, it then causes a huge insulin spike which drives the glucose out of your system while the fructose sits there in your system waiting to be processed by your liver. It gets processed moderately quickly into glucogen by the liver for it's use (a couple of sodas can do this for you) at which time, the liver starts converting it into fats for you to be placed in reserves for a later time.
When you say it's not a cause for obesity, you're mistaken. There's validated research that indicates that HFCS will make fit people (those
people you seem to praise in your comment...) fat. There's research that even smallish quantities of it over time will make someone that would
otherwise be fine into a Type II Diabetic. What you find in fruit's fine and beneficial. What you find in our food supply is those "large
quantities" the stuff you allude to. You can't avoid it unless you're willing to buy the more expensive "organic" foods. Exercise will not
help you out as eating it like we all have been doing changes the blood chemistry in your body in a way that even that will not help you do
anything except stave off the inevitable.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
The body regulates the rate of breakdown of sucrose (into fructose and glucose) through the enzyme sucrase. Ingesting fructose-glucose mixtures bypasses your body's regulation mechanism, resulting in faster uptake and greater stress on the body's other sugar-regulation mechanisms, such as insulin.
In the end, greater stress on a body system results in it wearing out sooner, hence the epidemic of adult-onset diabetes.
High-fructose corn syrup is NOT the same as sucrose. People with sucrose intolerance lack the enzyme and cannot properly digest sucrose.
Blame the mentality of the stupid people that have absolutely no self-control and societies that promote the concept that its 'ok to be who you are' no matter how gluttonous or morbidly obese that may be.
...and as ethanol continues to cause the price of corn to move higher, corn syrup will no longer be the "sweet deal" it was compared to sugar. At this point, corn syrup will fall out of favor for something cheaper... maybe even sugar again?
So hopefully, we are close to seeing a drop in corn syrup usage in our food products.
Big! Strong! Wow! Tada-O!
This assumes that the poor need to eat 8000 calories / day. I've yet to see a reasonable study showing that the food-stamp set can't with some reasonable shopping, get their *necessary* calories with (as someone else suggests here) beans, rice, and frozen (or maybe even canned) vegetables. Could anyone point me to some reasonable numbers?
Crappy processed food is often cheaper, true. But how much @#$%ing food does one need to eat in a day?
If you listen to the article, he says that sucrose (table sugar) is 50% fructose. HFCS used in soft drinks is 55% fructose. So sugar has just about the same amount of fructose as HFCS.
Ignoring government intervention for a moment: If lots of people made a decision to eat healthier, e.g. eat more vegetables, this drives up demand. That may temporarily even increase the prices further, but when demand is high AND prices are high, this attracts market entrants, as profitability is high in that sector. More farmers switch to growing veggies, new farmers start on veggies ... supply increases, competition increases, and prices go down ... but because there are more producers and the market is larger, greater economies of scale allow prices to be held sustainably lower. The trick is to get there. People "want" the bad cheap stuff because it's cheap ... large economies of scale etc. then allow the "bad" stuff to remain cheap, which helps keep it in demand.
Now that corn is being used so heavily for the production of ethanol in the US for use as an alternative to petroleum products, maybe now we can get our soft drink manufacturers to switch back to good old cane sugar and end this obesity epidemic once and for all! Looks like our buddy "Big Oil" has solved our health care crisis in America...
Seriously, I've seen substantial health benefits myself by cutting out corn syrup products from my own diet (30 pounds of weight loss, plus lowered blood sugar and LDL as a result of eliminating corn syrup and actually exercising something other than my typing fingers and mouse hand...)
Having returned from Costa Rica a month or so ago, and having sampled the local soft drinks (made with indigenously produced cane sugar), I can tell you definitively that they taste much better than their US counterparts. Coca-Cola, for instance, tasted much like I remembered "old" Coke tasting, not this Coke Classic crap they pushed off on us to shut us up about New Coke in the mid-80's. Pretty slick of Coca Cola to cut us over to pure garbage just long enough to not lose a lot of market share but erase the memory of how Coke should taste, and then play the hero role and bring us back what we believed to be our beloved beverage, all the while cutting over to high-fructose corn syrup. And you thought politicians were underhanded...
Thank you very much for your comment.
I'll look for that book and keep your advice in mind!
Matt
From the article: The second reason that exercise is important is because it's the single best treatment to get your cortisol down. Cortisol is your stress hormone, it's the hormone that goes up when you are mega-stressed, it's the hormone that basically causes visceral fat deposition which is the bad fat and it has been tied to the metabolic syndrome. So by getting your cortisol down you're actually reducing the amount of fat deposited and it also reduces food intake. People think that somehow exercise increases food intake, it does not, it reduces food intake.
What is this guy talking about? Ever since I started regularly exercising I am more hungry, more often. And actually hungry, not the confusion of eating out of boredom when I wasn't in shape. Just look at marathon runners, they need to eat tons of food to give them the energy they need. What this guy is saying seems so counterintuitive. Can anyone explain what he means or he is just crackers?
There is a lot more to grocery shopping than just buying food. Not even half of the stuff in your grocery cart is even edible, such as deodorants, paper towels, plastic bags, cleaning agents, yet you find the time to go out and buy those things. Why not spend another 30 minutes of your week buying healthier food? Just because they make convenient foods doesn't mean you have no choice but to buy them.
Learn to cook quicker meals. Slice up a few veggies, a chicken breast and cook some rice. You'll have a stir-fry that will feed a family of four in about 30 minutes. Or is 30 minutes a day too much to spend on your health?
Take that "big, evil corporation" attitude and shove it up your ass. I love White Castle. Their Murder Burgers taste pretty fucking good. But, I'm smart enough to 1) not eat them all the time and blame it on my busy day and, 2) not live in the city.
It's everyone else's fault but your's, isn't it?
The only reason for obesity "epidemics" is sedentary lifestyles that a lot of people are leading. Sitting for hours in front of a computer or TV does no good to you. And coincidentally computers and TVs weren't widely available in 1975.
I weighed nearly 300 pounds (around 135Kg for metric folks). I have a huge frame, but there's still around 35Kg of fat that I need to lose. About three years ago I had stopped drinking soda containing sugars, as well as sweet fruit juices. Didn't make even a bit of difference as far as my weight is concerned. Granted I started to feel much better, because my blood sugar wasn't on a roller coaster all the time, but that's about it. I did not make any other changes to my diet, though, so I still consume quite a bit of carbs as breads (and no, I don't eat donuts or sweets every day either).
So I bought a bicycle. So far it helped me to lose about 10Kg. This is not much, considering, but I'm making a slow, steady progress. In a few years I _might_ hit my target weight. Maybe even sooner if I change my diet.
The point I'm trying to make, I guess, is that there's no "epidemic". It's that people walk a hundred yards/metters a day and sit on their ass all day. No matter how many calories you consume (within reason), diet alone is not gonna make you leaner if you don't exercise. At least not for long.
Irrelevent. In the sentence, "Fructose comprises 50% of table sugar", "50% of table sugar" is the object of the sentence, not just "table sugar". It's the same mistake the ggpp made by thinking that the "of" is, so to speak, attached to the word "comprises" rather than to "50%". The example is not of the same format as the sentence in question. The example is passive, whereas the sentence in question is active.
Which brings me to a little rant. Words rarely mean what they used to mean, even just a mere century back. Most of the evolution of language is to simplify and systemize it in a more orderly fashion. The word "comprise" does, traditionally, have two meanings. However, if the two meanings are interchangeable, it makes the word useless. Take the following example: "Workahol comprises the element workaholine." That sentence, if we accept both definitions of "comprise", is worthless. It is saying nothing, because we don't know whether the element "workaline" is made of "workahol" or "workahol" is made of "workaholine". As a result, there is no distinguishable semantic difference, rendering the sentence meaningless.
Since we can't have the word mean two things at the same time, which must be mutually exclusive, we can only have the word to mean one thing. To figure this out in a systematic fashion, we can take the classic "is [past tense of verb] of" passive structure and turn it to the active structure using the same rules governing other verbs. Since object of the sentence is usually the first noun in the sentence of the passive structure, and it is the second noun in the active structure, we can just apply that to find a working definition of "comprise".
Doing so, we would find that in the passive structure "A is comprised of B" means that A is the "whole thing" that contains B. It is therefore reasonable to conclude that "B comprises A" would render the same semantic meaning.
Before you dismiss this as garbling linguistic theory, this is actually what happens in the mind when you come across a word that you don't recognize. If you come across the passive form of a sentence, you will automatically "convert" it to the active form to uncover the semantic meaning. Since we don't have a clear and distinct definition of "comprise" in the active voice, but somehow have a clear and distinct definition of it in the passive voice, we can use the passive voice to derive the meaning in the active voice. Forcing another meaning, and in fact the OPPOSITE meaning, on to the word would be quite an illogical thing to do.
I cut way down on sugar for the last few years because diabetes runs rampant in my family, but it didn't change my weight in any noticable amount. Cutting down on suger is good, but it won't necessarily change your weight. (True, I am only one datapoint, well, maybe too large to be a "point" :-)
Table-ized A.I.
"others worldwide as they adopt American-style diets" - like that'll ever happen. Good luck getting a European (not counting the English here, they're only half-European anaway) to adopt an American diet. A typical American meal just doesn't compare to a European meal when it comes to taste. That aside, it would also be unaffordable due to excessive meat content and everyone knows it's bad for you. Sure there are fast-food shops in Europe, but no sensible person would go there every day.
Obesity is not contagious. It's not the plague. The only reason it's referred to as an "epidemic" is so people can get sympathy even though eating all the crap that caused them to be obese was clearly their fault. It just further demonstrates that people can't fathom taking responsibility for their own actions. For the most part obesity isn't some untreatable horrible disease as people like to make it sound. The cure is self-control in most cases.
Most fructose (and dextrose) in the US is dervied from corn. And corn (along with soy, dairy (casein), wheat (gluten), peanuts, shellfish, and several others) is among the top food allergens found in the US diet. Pure fructose would not be any worse than sucrose. For instance, most people, even those who have problems with sugar cane, don't have a problem with maple syrup. The problem is the plant proteins that come along with it. These allergens cause inflamation of the digestive system, tie up the immune system, and generally slow metabolisms and make us more vulnerable to illness.
In American food, top ingredients include soybean oil and corn syrup. They're cheap and plentiful. So we use them to make everything. But they make us fat and sick.
Another thing recently discovered: Many hypothyroid conditions are actually caused by an epidemic iodine defficiency in the American diet. This is in part due to the FDA proscribing an RDA that is like 1/50 of what many people need.
Know why we don't know these things? Because MDs don't know dick about nutrition. They push drugs from the pharm companies and look for physical causes for illnesses. It's amazing to me, but looking for specific dietary causes seems to be the last thing an MD will consider. This is why my primary car physician is a nutritionist!
"Don't the British use corn sugar as table sugar?"
No.
Keep in mind corn is virtually unknown in the UK. We moved here in 64 and my parents were shocked people ate corn. As far as they were concerned it was good only for feeding chickens.
Corn on the cob? Corn as a side dish? Corn in fried rice? Never happens over there. It's for chickens.
Go to any dating site then look at what Americans consider "average" body size to be. Then look at what they consider "thin" to be. "Thin" in the US corresponds to "average" in the UK.
Also, take a look at any current yearbook class pictrure then look at one from 30 years ago. Today a thinn kid sticks out as unusual. Back then a fat kid stood out as unusual.
Need Mercedes parts ?
In Japan the drinks machines are full of Coffee/Tea, not soda.
There's also very little candy on offer. When I was there (about ten years ago) the only chocolate in the shops I saw was those crappy Mikado sticks.
Instant noodles are(were) much more popular than high sugar/fat snacks.
No sig today...
So they're returning to making whiskey?
The problem with HFCS in the Unites States is that because of subsidized corn industry, it has proliferated into the ingredients lists of a huge number of processed foods. It's not unreasonable to question what effect that may have.
As for the exercise question, the problem with eating an un-ideal food (or most foods containing an un-ideal additive) is that exercise doesn't escape its effect: if Sweden passed a law that said every meal should contain at least 2 tablespoons of salt in the ingredients, then in ten years, everybody in Sweden's going to have high blood pressure. It won't matter if they started out fat, thin, active or not.
And if anyone there exercises or not isn't going to matter--because while exercise would normally contribute to lowering your blood pressure, if it drives you to burn more calories and consume more over-salted food, then what's the net effect going to be?
~
I think he meant *munchy* -- eating for no reason -- rather than "hungry-with-purpose".
When you exercise, you tend to eat because you feel a whole-body NEED to eat -- to replenish fuel and nutrients.
But when you don't exercise, you tend to eat because your stomach happens to be empty and whining, or because you're bored, or because you ate carbs for breakfast and now your liver is being lazy and wants more carbs instead of using the fat all around it.
BTW, one way to avoid getting the munchies is to eat fat/protein for breakfast, and no carbs (or at least not refined carbs) before noon at the earliest.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
He's talking about sedentary people getting a bit of exercise. Not enough to build muscle or even burn THAT many calories. Your marathon runner is a bit of an extreme -- not only are they pure muscle (muscle burns lots of calories even when you're not using it) but in training they burn a LOT of calories.
So a sedentary person who gets a bit of exercise (say, goes for a walk) will tend to eat less than if they had just sat on the couch.
Not quite. Some PhD somewhere figured out how to make high fructose corn syrup. Then some executive somewhere, probably in the corn industry, realized that tariffs on sugar imports would provide a nice new market for corn.
The rest of the world doesn't use nearly as much corn syrup. I'm right across the border in Canada and soft drinks use sucrose for example.
I think he means intake as in actually taken up by your body and then stored. Stress is our old primal mechanism for making it easier to escape predators. It readies the body for intense energy use, i.e. running like crazy from some predator, and also makes sure your body regains the energy it used up, i.e. store whatever you eat afterwards as fat.
In the modern world, when we are stressed, we usually never need to expend a lot of energy. We get the adrenalin, we get the cortisol, and we sit and stare at our monitor, trying to finish this piece of code with the pointy-haired boss screaming at you. But we do get the signals to store food as fat. And if you're continously stressed, your body is continously trying to store as much fat as it can from the food you eat.
If you're not stressed, your body will be ok with not storing all the energy it can, it will regulate itself and not digest all the energy from the food you eat, only the energy you need.
Somewhat related to a number of the comments....
A book was published about a year ago, "Mindless Eating". It discussed the various factors that cause us to overeat and undereat. (The latter is a serious problem in combat situations in the military. It's one thing for a civilian to lose 20 pounds of fat, it's another thing for a fighting soldier to lose 20 pounds of muscle.)
It's easy to say "eat less/eat healthier", but that requires far more attention than you realize. Marketers are NOT trying to get you to eat poorly, they just want you to buy from them instead of the competitor. If everyone wanted broccoli, there would be broccoli stands on every corner.
Most people want something fast, cheap and filling. Chains have tried introducing healthier fare periodically (e.g., Taco Bell had 'lite' choices for awhile), but they weren't popular enough to be economically viable. But offer a larger standard drink or more fries and your sales climb, so you get a downward spiral that results in a pound of french fries and people drinking 64 ounces of soda.
Worse, this "renormalizes" what people expect. Did you know that coke bottles were originally 8 fl oz? Then pepsi introduced a standard 10 fl oz bottle as a marketing gimmick. Vending machines stabilized things at 12 oz for a while (since you had to stay at the standard size to be sold in the machine), but fast food restaurants competed with each other with larger and larger cups, free refills, etc. You could always buy a smaller size but that's psychologically hard when you get half as much drink but pay nearly the same price.
Ditto coffee. It used to be a cup or two in the morning, perhaps with a bit of cream. Then Starbucks came into the market and the sizes have not only increased, the amount of fat and sugar has exploded. People who would never consider drinking a milk shake every day (or even twice a day!) do this without thinking twice when it's a fancy Starbucks drink. If you want a cup (8 oz) of black coffee... good luck!
I think the most telling story was some guy at a yard sale(?) who asked if the seller had any more dinner plates in a set from the 40s. He was holding a serving platter. Historically dinner plates were around 8", but now they're usually 12" (iirc), or over twice as much area. People tend to fill their plates so we're eating a lot more food without thinking about it. Now look at sit-down restaurant chains (Chili's, Olive Garden, etc.) They're selling presentation so they use larger plates than you have at home, and they fill those plates. It's not an exaggeration to say that they serve 3 or 4 solid servings, nutritionally speaking.
This is gradual enough that most people aren't aware that it's happening, but we are eating a lot more food and finding it harder to eat the correct portions. How often have you seen a 6'+ adult order from the child's menu?
Does this excuse people from TRYING? No, of course not. But arrogant "people should know better" tirades don't help since changes requires us to be aware of the subtle changes that have lead us to the current selections and portion sizes.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
>> "passive fructose/sugar consumption". No, but there are still damages. Even though I dont get sick directly, a VAST portion of our national health care resources are spent on obesity-induced illnesses. So unlike smoking, we dont get sick directly, but we do get hit with a tax penalty. Also, due to allocation of limited resources, largely non-induced illnesses such as certain cancers get less health care/research funding.
Since only starches are affordable for the poor, and the poor and lower middle class can't afford gym memberships, it is fashionable to look down on those with insulin resistance caused by the diets and lifestyles they are limited to. And you don't have to feel guilty for looking down on the poor. You can pretend you are looking down on lazy people who over-eat. Even though that is a lie.
It would kate 1 growing season.
Once a crop is dead its dead. That's all there is to it.
Once crop subsidies are gone (which would save us money) they're gone.
So how do you make them go away?
STOP WRITING THE CHEQUES!
That all it takes. Just remove the check writing authority from some people.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Is the redefinition of obesity to include what used to be considered healthy - and which health statistics indicate -is- healthier than the new standards.
By the 'stroke of a pen' tens of millions of people who were previously considered healthy are now considered overweight to obese.
Instant 'obesity epidemic' and taxpayer money pours in.
The interviewee (Dr Robert Luddig) published the article The 'skinny' on childhood obesity: how our western environment starves kids' brains in the journal Pediatric Annals (abstract here). The article provides a detailed explanation of what he is proposing, including references to the research that backs up the theory.
HFCS is the main culprit.
No, it isn't.
HFCS you see in soda is a table-sugar substitute blend. It's chemically the same thing, only the molocules are arranged oh-so-slightly differently. In your stomach, where it matters for anything but tastes, there's zero difference.
The problem is sugar, period. If you replaced all of the HFCS in the world today with regular sugar, you'd have the exact same obesity problem.
"Kosher for passover" Coke is made with table sugar instead of HFCS, but it's exactly as bad for you as regular HFCS Coke. (From a dietary perspective, anyway. I know it matters if you're actually Jewish.)
Please, please, PLEASE stop clouding up the argument with that false comparison. The problem is that Americans eat too much, especially too much sugar.
Setting aside the health impacts, high fructose corn syrup is "cheaper" than sugar only because the government subsidizes corn growers and puts a tariff on sugar imports, to the point where sugar is 2x to 3x more expensive than it should be in the USA. It's public policy, not "some PhD somewhere", that drove every sugar-consuming business in America to look for more economical alternatives.
Here's what a former chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers (under the GWB administration, no less) has to say on the subject.
"I'm vibrating..."
I still get a laugh remembering that episode of "Dinosaurs".
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Making up diseases and reasons why people don't stop stuffing food into their faces is just providing convenient excuses for the weak and undisciplined.
I'm thin. Do you know why? Because I don't overeat. I know how much I need, and I stop when I'm done. I'm not a slave of my body; my body works for me. That's called discipline.
This might offend some people, but here it is anyway. Nobody's forcing you to put food into your mouth. You're doing it yourself. What would we call someone who made $5000 a month, yet insisted on spending $10,000 a month? We'd call them undisciplined, that's what. Just like you don't spend more than you got, you don't eat more than you need.
I'm sick of people around me whining about how they don't have control over their lives because of some disease or crap. Notice how all the rich successful people aren't whining? (OK, I'm rich and successful, and I do whine. I whine about lazy and undisciplined people who blame others for their problems.)
OK, rant over.
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
Funny how you insist that American sugar farmers can get 'real jobs' - but somehow the African farmers can't change crops or jobs?
Funny how you don't believe in capitalism OR social responsibility.
Let me get this straight you believe the government is right to increase the taxes (in the form of enforced, artificially high prices) from the rest of America to subsidize American sugar farmers because they are not competitive with the growing seasons and labor around the world. This hurts typical Americans because they pay higher prices. This hurts the third-world farmers because they aren't allowed to participate in a market they're good at (and move on to other areas like taking over IT jobs like you suggest or starve). That is socialism that only helps American sugar farmers.
Let's put it another way, if say Kansas raised the prices on all imported wood to raise it to the price of local grown lumber, wouldn't you think that hurts both residents of Kansas who's business is not lumber and wood exporting states like Washington? Is it really different if it is separate countries and not states within a country?
Yeah, all those morbidly obese marathon runners... I think he means excess food intake.
The aspartame sweetener is certainly a culprit in the obesity
epidemic. Aspartame is widely used as the artificial sweetener in
diet coke, diet pepsi, and hundreds of other 'diet' drinks and
foods. By itself, aspartame has no calories and diet coke has no
calories...so how could drinking a diet drink possibly contribute to
obesity? The reason is that it IS such a powerful
sweetener. It tastes sweet to the brain and the brain responds by
releasing insulin into the blood stream. The insulin released
then LOWERS the blood sugar and makes the victin feel hungry, leading
them to binge and gorge. The word for the effect is paradoxical
obesity.
The HFCS used in most soft drinks is (I believe) 50% fructose. It is metabolised almost identically to sucrose: there is an initial enzyme that splits sucrose into glucose and fructose at similar ratios to the contents of the corn syrup, after that the metabolism is identical.
The researcher's main point was that fructose is metabolized completely differently from glucose, in a way that is very unhealthy and dangerous in comparison. It's not the calories.
As more US maize (corn) is turned into ethanol, the price of maize is increasing. Eventually, the fast-food industry will use less of it. Cars don't get fat on corn syrup.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
"Old man Fructose!" gasped the gang. "Yes, that's right. I'm the one thats been making you fat all these years while posing as a mild mannered sweetner. And I would have gotten away with it too, if it weren't for you damn, pesky, nosy, snooping kids!" moaned Old Man Fructose. "Scooby snack as a reward, Scooby?" asked Velma. "Uhuh" replied Scooby, as he shook his head. "Too ruch shugar!"
Any nutrients that may be lost in the freezing process would generally be lost in the cooking process anyways, so unless you're eating fresh vegetables raw, there's no nutritional loss to eating frozen vegetables, and often times, you're getting fresher vegetables in the frozen bags than you would in the produce section of a supermarket.
I would never write something like that anyways...
Have you noticed a correct usage of the verb "to comprise" is also given ?
The programme comprises two short plays (they were chosen to make it up)
So "Fructose comprises of table sugar and corn syrup" means : "Fructose is made of sugar table and corn syrup. Let me doubt words could have the opposite meaning as the language evolves.
It just seems to me that the author and you confuse "to comprise" and "to compose". You may also want to read http://www.northeastern.edu/toolkit/messaging/styl e13.html#132 in order to perfect your article writing skills.
Note also that if the totals in fructose did not amount to more than 100%, it would have been more difficult to find the meaning of the sentence.
But to your defense, it seems to be accepted in the /. slang language ;-)
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=com prise
Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
As I pointed out here, you may find a resistance/weight training program also helps markedly. Dr. Bob Arnot's Guide to Turning Back the Clock is one of several fitness books aimed at the 30-70+ crowd which seems to do a really good job of laying out what works and how to do it. You might also want to start tracking your body fat percentage, caliper and tape-measure methods you can do yourself (just don't cheat the measurements).
Karsten M. Self (http://www.linuxmafia.com/~karsten
We are so dependent on corn that if we had some kind of corn blight - and the crops are so heavily bioengineered they have no hardiness remaining to them - we'd be facing actual famine in the US. Much less making surplus grain for ethanol manufacture so we could become "energy independent". Here's where it seems very reasonable to start learning gardening skills early and planting root vegetables. And learn to can.
McDonalds and Burger King buns as well as Pizza Hut pizza sauce taste repulsively sweet once you're no longer used to a certain minimum amount of sugar in each meal.
Take a look at the ingredient list of hotdog/hamburger buns the next time you're at the supermarket.
Why does a simple bun need high fructose corn syrup added as a sweetener? It should be flour, yeast, water, and not much else.
Chip H.
Each time you eat, insulin is released into the bloodstream. This vital hormone, secreted by special cells in the pancreas, encourages your tissues-particularly your muscles-to gobble up the glucose surging through the bloodstream after a meal. That's good, because glucose hanging about in the blood is dangerous stuff. It can stick to proteins and destroy their ability to do their job. Blindness, kidney damage and amputations may result.
But insulin has another vital role. After a meal, it stops the liver from releasing any fat, a potential metabolic fuel, into the blood. Why after a meal? It turns out that just like glucose, these fats are dangerous if they hang about in the blood too long. They are released as triglycerides, carried within molecular escorts known as very low density lipoproteins, or VLDLs. But in the blood they become altered biochemically in a way that makes them more likely to stick to artery walls.
And of course once the arteries become narrowed by such fatty plaques, a heart attack may not be far away. These fats are particularly undesirable in the bloodstream just after a meal because the enzymes that can safely remove them from circulation are busy dealing with fat from the food youve just eaten. The road to syndrome X begins with frequent high-energy snacks, exposing the liver to insulin for long periods without a decent break.
When insulin is present for long periods, it flicks a metabolic switch in the liver that prevents it from inhibiting triglyceride secretion. Instead, perversely, insulin stimulates the liver to release even more triglycerides, carried within heart disease promoting VLDLs.
It's a vicious cycle; the excess triglycerides make muscle cells insulin-resistant, interfering with the signaling pathway that normally allows them to soak up glucose from the blood. As a result, more insulin needs to be secreted, and full-blown syndrome X is fast approaching. Eventually your adipose cells-bombarded with extra calories to store in the form of triglycerides and glucose-succumb to insulin resistance too. In a final twist, the overloaded fat cells flood the blood with fatty acids that in turn start killing the insulin-secreting pancreatic cells.
Insulin levels plummet; glucose accumulates in the blood even between meals-and a diagnosis of type 2 diabetes is made. If you fail to change your diet and lose weight, the destruction of insulin-secreting cells continues apace. Eventually, daily injections of insulin are needed just to keep you alive. Its a frightening scenario, but you can do something about it. For a start, you can exercise to use as many of our muscles as possible, and to help them use up the extra fatty fuel.
A moderate amount of daily exercise might even prevent the dramatic rise in blood triglyceride levels that happens when healthy volunteers are switched to a high-sugar diet. Your liver has evolved to cope with infrequent meals. You should try to eat less often-leaving a good 4 or 5 hours between meals and cutting out snacks. Two meals a day could be better for you than continual snacking.
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
- Avoid fast food
- Use Stevia, Honey, or Agave Syrup for sweetening at home
1) That's a couple orders of magnitude away from what he's talking about. He's talking about "Twenty minutes of jogging". Once you're talking about burning thousands of calories, it's not really a form of "exercising" anymore.
2) He's mostly talking about already-obese individuals.
3) He didn't say exercise reduces food intake, but that "getting your cortisol down" will reduce food intake and fat deposits, and exercise is a good method to cause cortisol levels to go down, as well as other benefits.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I used to work in a drink factory that used HFCS, we had huge tanks of it. Anyway, I thought it would be clever to stop putting sugar in my coffee and instead using the free HFCS that was on tap from the tank. HFCS has a definite, distinctive, horrible taste. Unfortunately, due to this experiment, I can taste the HFCS in any drink that has it, and it makes me gag. It's the same taste as cheap American beer.
Just wondering since I've seen people say that Cola with "real" sugar is better than HFCS. Last I checked acid turns sucrose into glucose and fructose.(IE, an invert sugar.) anybody know how long it'd take the sucrose in say a coke to get turned into basically a glucose/fructose mix just like HFCS?
You've got a lot of valid points there in your reply, but there is really no need to oppose the fructose theory, just because overeating other stuff exists as well. Fructose resorption is different: it gets into your bloodstream really late, from your guts, that is, while glucose and saccharose (the 'better' sugars) hop over from your stomach on. This is one of the reasons why glucose kicks in so quickly if you're low on blood sugar and hastily chew a dextrose plate, btw. The effect: fructose doesn't saturate your hunger nor your appetite, so you order another plate.
And maybe you forgot to point out that lots of fructose is in that quarter pounder as well. And in that cheese that comes with it. And in the ketchup and whatever dressing there might be. Not to mention the bread it is sandwiched between.
Finally, I'm sure you'll have a hard time finding lots of HFCS (high fructose corn syrup) products inside any sample of those Japanese vending machines (Personally, I just love them and am positively addicted to Pocari Sweat, C.C.Lemon and one more, which I never can remember the name of, plus all those coffee and tea varieties, yum!). And people drink lots of those drinks as well. Some people say you wouldn't be able to even survive the Japanese summer if there weren't any vending machines around. They're an insane waste of electrical energy, though. But that's another discussion.
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
For those of you who are claiming the whole "fast food"/laziness/etc angle is the real cause and the fructose/carb stuff is BS, read this article and some of the other articles Lustig has been cited in.
The first important thread which he tries to stress in his research is that individuals (and "unhealthy" food choices/lack of exercise) have only limited culpability in the obesity epidemic. Many of these children with childhood obesity have been put on increased exercise programs/low calorie diets--and the shocking finding is that these only have limited effect.
This is because of complicated endocrine changes that happen in obese people. The bodies of already obese children (and adults), when put on a lower-calorie diet, actually initiate a starvation response which DECREASES their resting energy expenditure (causing laziness and fatigue/etc) and increases the efficiency with which the body extracts calories from food. These changes often compensate for the decreased caloric intake/exercise resulting in an absolute weight loss plateau. Try as they might, people at this plateau find it nearly impossible to lose further amounts of weight.
The second important point is that it seems these endocrine changes can be blamed to a large degree on our increasingly "insulinogenic" diet, since it causes insulin resistance and effectively makes us resistant to leptin (the "I'm full" hormone). While eating unhealthily (junk food/fast food) contributes to this partially, an equally large contribution is due to the increased prevalence of HIGHLY PROCESSED foods that are low in fiber and high in simple carbohydrates--pasta made from white flour, bread, white rice, fruit juices with and without high fructose corn syrup, cereals with corn syrup, etc.
If you note the foods I've mentioned here, you'll notice that even somewhat "healthy" modern diets (no fast food or junk food) would still contain high proportions of these "unhealthy" carbohydrates.
Yet, many of these are foods have been eaten by humans for a long time, without an obesity epidemic--how does this happen? The answer is that, today, they are processed in ways that skews their nutrient content to make foods that are nutritionally different from the foods which we have evolved to subsist on.
To make an exaggerated analogy, it's as if the foods we eat have been silently poisoned without our knowledge. Next time you're at the grocery store, look at the amount of sugar/high fructose corn syrup in the "savory" processed foods and "health foods" that are sold there. It's very eye-opening.
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
The problem is not fructose. It is overconsumption. People have been fed this notion that one type of food or the other is making them fat, and cutting out that type of food will make them loose weight. It's like there is some "magic combination" of food that we are supposed to eat, and, conveniently, you have to buy the book to learn what it is. In almost all cases it is a simple matter of overconsumption. If you eat too much (insert uber-healthy food here) it will be stored as fat. It's not fructose's fault anymore than it's any other specific food's fault. It's quantity. The amount of exercise and activity people typically get doesn't help matters much either.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
Ever wonder why your cat has no interest in sweets? Never developed the taste buds. Its ancestors' diets simply didn't require it. So why did we humans develop sweet-sensing taste buds? Well, so we'd be attracted to consuming fruit, of course. And why would our ancestor's have been better off eating fruit? Well, it was probably a key nutrient pathway for many of the vitamins and minerals that are so crucial to our body's processes. For the most part, it appears to have worked out well enough for our 'primitive' ancestors.
Fast forward to today, however, and you can see that our society has learned to exploit our own genetic predisposition to enjoy sweet things. From the obvious things like cookies, cakes, candy and soft drinks, to the less obvious foods like marinades, dressings, sauces, TV dinners, soups and breakfast cereals (even many of the so-called "healthy" ones.) Many of these products are chock full of refined sugars, mostly in the form of the cheap and readily available high fructose corn syrup.
But it's not the corn lobby that's to blame. They're just the latest and most evident in a long history of exploiters. Refined sweets are so universally accepted by most cultures living on the planet today that it's practically impossible to see them for what they are. Kids are taught from a young age to enjoy the taste of refined sweets, rather than fruit. Don't we all literally have a good laugh when someone calls fruit "nature's candy"!? And what kind of sick f*ck gives out apples at Hallowe'en anyway? And don't forget: "C is for Cookie that's good enough for me!"
And we pay the price, in the form of Diabetes and a multitude of other disorders which can at least partially be blamed on the ease with which we substitute the delicate taste of fresh fruit for the overpoweringly sweet taste of nutrient-less concentrated corn syrup.
As I just got back from Java One and RailsConf, my observations are the following:
1) US portions are really huge. I usually only managed to eat half of the meal at restaurants, unless I had sushi. However, by the end of the two weeks, I had started to adapt to eat almost all of it.
2) Sugar and fat in everything, even the salads. Bread, even dark bread, was disgustingly sweet. Lots of fried food, meat as a topping on other meat (beef burgers with sliced chicken on top sprinkled with crispy bacon etc)
3) People drove everywhere.
4) There are restaurants absolutely everywhere.
The JavaOne breakfast was especially disgusting. Mounds of glaced dessert breads and sodas. When I had breakfast at the hotel, the buffet included stuff like that, and I saw Americans actually load up plates with chocolate danish, glazed donuts etc and have a big coke with it. For breakfast.... it was unbelievable.
Most people in the world are either fit or fat. Most Americans i saw were either fat, or muscular AND fat (many of those, especially young guys had a strange sort of two centimeter layer of lard all over, like a seal). So hi fructose sugars and trans-fats may be a contributing cause, but if you think removing these things from food will magically make the obesity epidemic go away you are in for a disappointment I think.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
Except you forgot that just hiking alone won't burn your fat. You have to get your heart going (run, cycle, etc). This boosts your metabolism and you burn more calories. If you manage to keep your calorie intake the same as before you started exercising, you will inevitably lose weight. That's just basic physics.
Next time you go there, go to Akihabara, the legendary geek district of Tokyo. Near the JR-Yamanote line station there are a couple of multi-story sex shops there, and after entering one and doing a bit of exploration (which I must say is an experience that shook me to the core!), inside one of these I did manage to see one of these legendary vending machines that sell soiled schoolgirl panties. I even saw a guy in the act of buying something from it that time, and true enough, it contained the goods. I imagine that such vending machines are not exactly common (the one I got to see was inside a sex shop, not even out on the street), but they are most certainly not apocryphal.
By the way, sex shops aside, Akihabara is a place well worth visiting if you're a geek of any stripe. The place is loaded with electronic gadgets and computer equipment, anime, manga, and the like. It has credible claim to being the geek capital of the world.
Qu'on me donne six lignes écrites de la main du plus honnête homme, j'y trouverai de quoi le faire pendre.
The basic problem is eating more than you need - nothing difficult to understand there. The big question is WHY do we eat more than we need?
One explanation is certainly in what we eat - feeling satisfied after a meal is more complicated than just pointing to the volume of food or the amount of energy consumed. Our bodies register not only the fullness of the stomach, but also blood sugar levels, fat content, proteins, vitamins and minerals, and probably many more things. This is one reason why you can feel hungry after having eaten a big piece of meat; it didn't contain all the things you needed. So, one element in reducing calorie intake is eating a COMPLETE diet with all the nutrients you need.
Then there is the ease of getting a meal - if you can just buy something to eat the moment you feel the tiniest inclination to eat, you will end up eating much more than you need. The trick here, I find, is to not carry cash around - it somehow feels stupid to use a credit card just to buy one small item, like a bar of candy. When it is a little bit difficult to get a meal, you'll often find that you can't be bothered until you are feeling real hunger.
Boredom - if you are bored, what is the easiest thing to do? Eat! Eating is something that satisfies a very fundamental instinct, and thus it is a highly attractive activity for most people. So, avoid getting bored - go outside, make plans for your spare time etc.
Meal size - we have learned from childhood (as well as from our instincts) that it is wrong to throw away food, you have to finish everything on your plate. And simple common sense says that if you can buy a reasonable sized meal for X USD, and a double-sized meal for just 10% more, you go for the bigger one. This is one of the advantages of Chinese/Japanese style meals - even if you have 10 different dishes in front of you, you only take a little at a time (beacuase the bowl is small).
Eating time - it takes about 30 minutes to register that you've had enough calories to eat. This means that if you wolf down a triple mega-whopper meal, you won't really feel full unless your stomach has been filled to bursting; the signal that you've had enough calories won't register until later. And that means that over time, your stomach's holding capacity gets bigger, and you learn to ignore the signals about having had enough calories. The thing to do, is to start your meal with a piece of fruit (gets your blood sugar up quickly), and then eat slowly - another reason to avoid fast food. Again, Chinese style meals, especially if you have company and spend a lot of the time talking, is a help - you get a better chance of feeling full.
"unbagged bunches, seriously!"
What's so weird about buying vegetables loose rather than in packaging? Does this not happen in the USA?
In the UK packaged vegetables cost more, they are cheaper purchased loose in both supermarkets and small greengrocers. Not sure if you have small greengrocers, media reports suggest that your big supermarkets have closed down most small shops and you generally drive to out of town malls for all your food. Is that a media myth or true?
Over here in the UK, packaged vegetables cost more than loose, washed vegetables cost more than unwashed, and pre-processed vegetables cost the most (e.g. carrots already washed, topped and tailed and cut into sticks and then sealed in plastic bags). Buying the last is considered to be a bit of a yuppie middle classed thing to do. Standard joke is "what next? pre-chewed?" Washing and chopping up veggies is still the norm.
Price difference between pre-everything'd and loose and needing washing is maybe three times.
And studies indeed seem to keep showing that obesity problems are more significant for the lower social classes. And while less money to buy healthy food is one problem, educational deficiencies about what is healthy and what isn't are another. Imposing the question to which extent access to education is a matter of social class as well, which shows another potential link between social class and such a society's obesity problem.
Well you're probably missing the other major category of unhealthiness caused by massive amounts of poly-unsaturated fats used in frying (not a heat stable oil) and as preservatives in foods these days. Back in the good-old-days(tm) more saturated fats were used than mono- and polys-.
But that's a whole other head of the multi-headed beast that is poor health, agribusiness and the corporations.
It wasn't American's own fault at all !
What people don't seem to realise is that refined sugar and refined salt etc. are, nutritionally speaking, essentially raw chemicals, like iron or magnesium. Of course that's going to screw you up! Even if you're "only" mixing a few tablespoons of iron into a cake, it's going to screw you up.
Then they were invited to all-you-can-eat lunch buffets more than two hours later. People who drank the three sweetened colas in the morning said they felt equally full.
At lunch, they all consumed similar numbers of calories.
A likely explanation is that once inside the body, the different sweeteners are indistinguishable, Monsivais said.
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/health/496145
Foodstamps aren't meant to provide everything. They are meant as a supplement until someone gets back to work.
Read all aboot it! Excess sugar makes you fat! duH! Seriously, it's it quite obvious that excess calorie intake, coupled with little to no excersise will cause people to gain weight. Go to Europe where food is expensive, and cars are even more expensive. So no one can affort to eat (well not quite but..). And everyone walks because opperating a car is too expensive (fuel, parking). This is mainly due to the fact that most European cities were build before the invention of the automobile. Thus everything has alway been within walking distance, if not then you take the train, metro/subway/tube, or the bus. That's my 10 cents, my 2 cents is free. KiwiCanuck
Yes and no. Actually I said "cheap food is driving out good food", but my whole point was that "cheap" is not necessarily equal to "bad" - we've just been brainwashed into thinking that - and that if economies of scale and demand could be used to make good food cheap enough (even close in price to the bad), then good food could also be driving out the bad food instead. We've been conned by marketing into thinking that "healthy" food is some premium niche market. Bollocks - that's marketing - there's a reason why many other countries (and earlier generations, even) eat both far cheaper and far healthier simultaneously. Only in Western societies do we now think that food must be expensive if it's good for you.
I don't know where you find your 30 second, 50 cent salads, but in my experience salad makes an inconvenient snack in three ways:
1. In order to make your own, you must keep fresh veggies on hand. While this can be pretty cheap, it can be difficult to use all your produce before it goes bad--especially if you don't eat salads every day. Also, unless your "salad" consists of little more than lettuce, it will take at least a few minutes to chop the requisite veggies and wash them.
2. If you choose to forgo letting lettuce rot in your fridge, you can buy serving-sized salads in most grocery stores or restaurants with salad bars (even some of those dreaded fast food places sell salads). These, however, are a far cry from 50 cents; they usually cost more than the hamburger (which, by the way, only costs 5 bucks if you get the whole value meal). Most that I have seen cost somewhere between 3 and 6 dollars, depending on how healthy you want it to be.
3. It is not advisable to eat a salad while driving. Period.
But one day Tom, he went and caught the River-daughter, in green gown, flowing hair, sitting in the rushes
I'm a wanna-be triathlete. Done several runs over the last couple years, have been getting more into biking, and just started swimming again. My own caloric intake has probably increased by about 50% (at the very least) since I've started training. The very cool thing is that despite that increase, I've actually lost body fat, so I have a bit more tone and definition now than I ever did as a teenager or tweenager ;-)
... Frustrating as all hell ...
So this guy is wrong, at least on this count. But the athlete's diet also has many of the components like any other good-sense diet out there - lots of fruits and vegetables for your nutrients, and lots of complex carbs (as this is what gets stored in your muscles and liver, and fuels you for the long haul at the intensities the higher-tier athletes perform at), proteins and a smattering of fats. As an athlete, you just take in larger quantities (though not substantially larger) of these things than a more sedentary individual.
I'm just wondering in how many different ways we can hear the message before people really start hearing it
A friend of mine was telling me about a restaurant like that somewhere in... Iowa? -- out Midwest, at any rate -- which worked with a system somewhat like that. Actually, it was even more impressive: There were no posted prices, and the policy was that people simply paid whatever that thought was fair!
Once or twice a year, someone would leave without paying. But over the course of a typical day, apparently, no meal would cost the establishment more than was paid for it! And occasionally, it'd even happen that someone in a particularly generous mood would leave a $100 bill for a meal! Overall, they made quite a reasonable profit.
But then, this was located in a small town, and, generally, you'd expect that the people who'd eat there would be repeat customers. That sounds like the key in the place you're describing? In game theory, it's often proven that the "rational" person is pretty horrible, doing all sorts of nasty things -- but those results change completely once you add the assumption of repeated interaction with other players. [This touches on DDLKermit007's post (It'd be nice if Slashdot would let you reply to multiple posts with a single reply, so that forums could take on a more general directed graph topology than the heirarchical tree structure we have now... but I digress) to the effect that Japanese bus-riders feared ostracism, but I'm not sure I intend my point to have connotations that are quite as negative.]
I wonder what would happen if you set up a restaurant like that in a city?
None of mine ever do. Where do you live, a 1940's detective novel?
Visual IRC: Fast. Powerful. Free.
Don't forget the Canadians, who - while our population mix tends to come from many of the above anyhow - are just busy making sure nobody claims we are Americans...
p.s. If you think American junk food is bad, try Scottish. Deep-fried Mars-bars anyone?
I don't even live in the States and I know people that occasionally drink bourbon.
You do realise that usually what is produced as 'whiskey' in the U.S. is in fact bourbon, right?
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
mexicans are already sh*tting themselves with raised prices for corn/tortillas because of corn shortages due to ethanol. and its only going to grow with more green demand. soon the cheap corn syrup won't be so cheap and problem solved!
I'm not sure that fructose or high fructose corn syrup is what is making everyone fat, it's probably just that we're eating more high calorie products (sugar-based, fructose-based, etc.) than we used to. That being said, sugar-based soft drinks taste a hell of a lot better than high fructose corn syrup-based ones.
I recently moved to Texas and was introduced to Dublin Dr. Pepper which is bottled by the first and oldest Dr. Pepper bottler in Dublin, TX. They kept using pure cane sugar when everyone else switched to high fructose corn syrup (HFCS). It's somewhat hard to come by outside of Dublin, but if you can find it I highly recommend it. I've also tried some other sugar-based soft drinks (Mexican Coca-cola for one) and they have a much cleaner taste with no nasty aftertaste compared to other HFCS-based drinks.
PS If you live near Austin, TX then read Dublin Dr. Pepper and Austin to learn where to find a good, cheap source of Dublin Dr. Pepper near Austin.
infested with jello like fishes no melotron wishes
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. Pollan points out the corn -> cheap calories -> obesity link in the article. He also criticizes nutritionism, which is in abundant supply in the replies to this post. His book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, is a good read, and quite relevant to the discussion.
"Mit der Dummheit kaempfen Goetter selbst vergebens." - Schiller
there are 2 techniques to socialize every new batch of barbarians: the west has successfully used an internal mechanism, guilt, to instill acceptable behavior, and the east has relied on an external: shame. both work, both have downsides...
take the jap.soldier out of his village, freed from the shame-imposing watch of his neighbors, and he has no problem catching babies on bayonets.
likewise, god-fearing germans can easily be persuaded to burn jesus-killers...